Are You Using Twitter Effectively?

I’m a tech journalist and writer in my day job. I’ve been a twitter user for many years. I tweet all sorts of things of interest to my readers and others from information about my books to career milestones, causes I support, and more. For my day-to-day twitter needs, I use Tweet Deck, a powerful, handy app that Twitter bought for a cool $47 million in cash and stock some time ago.

One of the things I notice from people and tweet streams I follow is how often people who position themselves as social media elite decry others for using twitter incorrectly while they themselves do things that I consider just as bad. But does it really matter anyway? Does anyone really think that a tweet sent once is read by all their followers? Because that's not how twitter works. By its very nature, twitter isn't something most people log into and watch 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At any given time, on any given day, odds are only a tiny percentage of anyone’s twitter followers are even following their twitter timelines.

In reality, anything anyone in the public spotlight (author, actor, singer) does on social media is self-promotion. Your tweets don't have to be the me-me-me kind, but whether you are talking about what you ate for breakfast, sharing details about your latest release, or having a conversation with your friends, you are promoting you. You are self-promoting. You are on social media to be noticed, to be followed. If you didn’t want to be noticed or followed, you’d have private conversations beyond the social media spotlight.

If you can’t admit to yourself that you’re a self-promoter, if being thought of as a self-promoter bothers you, maybe social media isn’t the place for you. Otherwise, if you’re going to be honest and admit that it’s all self-promotion, a question you need to ask yourself is whether you are using twitter effectively.

Twitter can be an exceptionally effective tool for helping people get to know you, for spreading the word about your work, for showing support for causes and ideas you believe in, and more. One of the things I’ve done to help understand Twitter better is to use Twitter Web Analytics.

Twitter Web Analytics is a platform for gauging the amount of traffic twitter sends to your website or specific locations (URLs). Using the platform, you can graph and analyze many important statistics, including the number of tweets for a specific website, such as www.robert-stanek.com, and the number of clicks on those tweets. For me, the platform was most useful to analyze specific tweets that included links, such as a link to my Facebook page or my blog, and views of pictures added to tweets. I could then graph the number of tweets, views, and clicks over time. These tweets, views, and clicks were one way of understanding how effectively I was engaging with readers.

Twitter Advertising is another service you can use. Twitter Advertising allows you to promote your account and tweets. As Twitter Advertising provides web analytics, it can be an easy alternative to setting up the official Twitter Web Analytics and determining the effectiveness of your tweets. I learned much from analyzing the effectiveness of various tweets. One of the most important things I learned was that a retweet (RT) was only one aspect of engagement. Knowing this, I started focusing on total engagement.

Total engagement is reflected in:

• The number of follows
• The number of clicks (on links, pictures)
  
• The number of replies
  
• The number of RTs
• The number of favorites

If you want to build total engagement on Twitter, you need to think about each of these factors and decide which of these factors are most important to you. For me, I became more interested in having people engage with my tweets by clicking on them to follow links or view pictures than in having replies or retweets. Using the web analytics provided by Twitter, I’ve been able to increasingly build traction in this area. While my most typical tweets get only a relative few retweets and replies, most of my tweets get dozens of engagement clicks and views. My more successful tweets have garnered hundreds--and a rare few, thousands. For me, that is Twitter success.

How you measure your Twitter success may be different, but you can use the engagement factors I listed previously to help you determine your level of success. Regardless of how you use twitter, I hope this post has given you something to think about.

Thanks for reading,

Robert Stanek

Silence is Never the Answer When It Comes to Bullies and Trolls

By now you’ve probably heard of #twittersilence—a day of silence to protest abusive trolling on twitter. After reading the Daily Beast article about it on Aug 2 and seeing #twittersilence trending on Aug 3, I participated in the tweets but was soon astonished to see author Maureen Johnson participating. Not only was Maureen Johnson a twitter troll, having participated in several online attacks against me, Maureen Johnson was someone who egged on my stalkers and thought it was hilarious that they were sending me threats, as did her author friend, Victoria Strauss. Apparently, author Maureen Johnson also blogged recently about how she wished “all stalking would end.” Odd as she and her friends goaded on my stalkers with their words and actions time and again.

Participating in the #twittersilence wasn’t about Maureen Johnson, however. It was about raising your voice or taking a silent stand. Hundreds raised their voices and spoke out against bullies and trolls. Hundreds took a silent stand and did the same.

Personally, I was glad to see twitter take a decisive stand so quickly. Amazon had allowed my readers to be harassed and attacked on its site for years and had never done anything about it, except to punish readers who dared to report the problem while often allowing the harassers to continue without consequence. Why? Because Amazon chose to ignore the problems and pretend such problems don’t exist. Hello, Amazon, when you allow discussions and comments on your site, such problems will and do exist.

Perhaps Amazon will learn a few lessons from Goodreads.com, a company Amazon recently acquired. When faced with similar problems, Goodreads.com didn’t ignore the problems or pretend they didn’t exist. Goodreads.com took action.

In 2012, Goodreads.com added privacy controls to profiles to control who can see member profiles. Members also were then able to control who could follow their reviews, who could send them private messages, who their email address could be shared with, who their reviews could be shared with, and who could see their birthdate and age.

In late 2012, Goodreads.com banned sexual role-play in its discussion forums. Although sexual role-play was a large part of its daily traffic, Goodreads.com took this step to help ensure the safety of children at its site. Why such a site ever allowed sexual role-play is another matter altogether, but at least thousands of children who participate in Goodreads.com are safer now.

In early 2013, Goodreads.com took action again to prevent harassment and intimidation by adding an option to ensure only friends of a member could comment on a member’s reviews and profile.

All these things together make Goodreads.com a better, safer site. Your turn, Amazon. You willing to make your site a harassment/troll-free zone?